News

Parkland is Redesigning Healthcare

July 3, 2019

Parkland's Outpatient Antibiotic Therapy (OPAT) program is proving that healthcare can be delivered in a way that improves the health of the population while decreasing costs. Since 2009, the program has trained patients to safely administer their own an IV antibiotics at home in an effort to reduce hospital stays and improve their experience.

Before the OPAT program, when a patient developed an infection that required IV antibiotic therapy, they spent at least 42 days in Parkland hospital. The assumption was that patients requiring IV therapy could not manage their own care. With the OPAT program, patients who have responded well to their antibiotic therapy in the hospital have been trained by their care team to administer their own treatment at home and are discharged within one week.

“We proved that the idea that all innovation has to be tech heavy is just not true. OPAT is all about self-sufficiency, self-advocacy and investing in the human potential of our patients,” explained Kavita Bhavan, MD, Medical Director of the Infectious Diseases OPAT Clinic at Parkland and Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

In its first four years, OPAT patients had a 47% lower 30-day readmission rate than insured patients who had the help of an at-home nurse. This also opened 28,000 additional hospital bed days while avoiding $40 million in costs.

The OPAT program is being used as a model to create new programs for patients to manage their care in the comfort of their homes. Two new programs include:

End-stage heart failure: On average, end-stage heart failure patients stay 66 days in Parkland hospital until the end of life. Using the OPAT model, the patient’s family is taught how to administer the infusions they need at home giving the patient the dignity of spending their final days in the comfort of their home.

Peritoneal dialysis: Uninsured patients on emergent or unscheduled dialysis programs, on average, have a nine times higher likelihood of dying within one year when compared to an insured patient. A new OPAT program will allow the patients to manage their care at home by providing them with a dialysis catheter.

“In healthcare, we rarely see consumer research about what patients want,” said Dr. Bhavan. “When OPAT patients were asked why they think they had better outcomes than patients with home health nurses, they said ‘because it’s my body’. There’s something really profound about that.”

What’s being developed at Parkland is not just for the most vulnerable in our community. The OPAT program is an example of innovation born out of necessity. Training and educating patients through programs like OPAT creates the groundwork for more equitable and efficient healthcare delivery nationwide.